The gateway to the cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, scene of the bloodiest battle of the American civil war.
Photograph: Timothy H O’Sullivan/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Twenty-five years ago, as the school bell rang and I gathered my books to leave Mrs Bischoff’s American literature class, Mr Goebel, my history teacher, came in to discuss some administrative business. She interrupted him to ask if he “watched it last night”.

Without mentioning a title, their conversation about harrowing photographs, heartfelt letters and melancholy music made it clear they were discussing the PBS miniseries The Civil War. I considered weighing in, but other students were around, and I already had a reputation for liking uncool things as a self-identifying Trekkie. That’s when Ian, a year older and one of the more popular kids, jumped in to say “that Civil War show is rad.” Talk about a show everyone could love.

It was 1990 and everybody was buzzing about the battles of Shiloh, first and second Manassas, Antietam and Gettysburg. We weren’t covering the civil war yet in history (we were still at 1066) but an executive decision was made for us to skip ahead a little bit. While I was definitely more inclined to opt in to a public television historical program, film-maker Ken Burns’s nine-night masterpiece managed to engage and enrich everyone.

What I didn’t realise then was how this 11-and-a-half-hour documentary would have a hold on me for the rest of my adult life. During my late teen years I fell in with a group of snobs, and we prided ourselves on only using our televisions when we’d rent indie, foreign, classic or underground films on VHS. But PBS was OK because they’d show Monty Python reruns and concerts. Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, you could always count on Burns to come back with The Civil War during a pledge drive. (We were lucky, or perhaps cursed, to live in an area that would get New York, Philadelphia and the rarely watched New Jersey public stations, so this meant triple the Civil War ubiquity.)

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Despite the deep subject matter, I find The Civil War incredibly relaxing. Some of my most comforting memories are being on my friend’s parents’ couch, nodding off to soothing fiddle music as narrator David McCullough rattles off facts about Pickett’s Charge, Burns’s camera floating over haunting photographs. (A technique he did not invent, but was later dubbed by Apple editing software as the Ken Burns effect.) The Civil War always seemed to be on just when you needed it, like a lazy summer Sunday afternoon that turned into night and continued straight on to the wee hours. “Yes, I’ll go to bed soon, but just after I hear the reading of the Gettysburg address.”

In the ensuing years I’ve found that many in my peer group have had similar repeat encounters with the show. Not everyone watched it from top to bottom, but there are parts everyone remembers. Most famous is actor Paul Roebling’s reading of an obscure letter from a Union officer named Sullivan Ballou. It was written to Ballou’s wife a week before being mortally wounded at the first battle of Bull Run. His remarkable, heartfelt words did the impossible – they took a boring page from history and made it more emotional than any Hollywood movie.

With some help, though. Ballou’s letter was set to an obscure piece of music called Ashokan Farewell, a simple, sad fiddle tune with piano and upright bass composed by Jay Ungar in 1982. Burns had used it in a previous documentary about Huey Long, but set against Ballou’s words and the perfectly selected ghostlike photographs, it became a microcosm for the insanity of America’s bloodiest war. Burns concluded the first episode in the miniseries with this sequence, punching everyone who was watching right in the gut.

The song, while still beautiful, is a bit of a joke today. Long before Louis CK parodied it my girlfriend (now wife) and I would make a similar gag whenever we’d come across anything historic on trips to her parents’ place in North Carolina. “What’s that, an old mill? Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee …”

Burns’s decision to plunder contemporary diaries is without question the most striking aspect of his film. The sources he used included the notes and letters from a Union soldier named Elisha Hunt Rhodes, a volunteer infantryman who served for the duration of the war, and whose writings were published by his great-grandson years later. On the other side (but with many similar observations) was Sam Watkins, a Confederate from Tennessee who also fought the whole war. He published his memoir, Co Aytch, in 1882. At some point years ago I bought both. Haven’t gotten to them yet, but some day.

The first-person source that’s meant the most to me over the years, however, was the journal of George Templeton Strong, a lawyer from New York who watched the world around him with a keen eye. His 2,250-page diary was discovered in the 1930s, and Burns uses it to counter the horror of battle with mundane facts of urban life away from the front. The quotes he chooses always end on a poignant note, and, as with all primary documents, Burns has the voiceover actor take a beat and then repeat the author’s name. This leads us to Burns’s other great coup: his casting.

Three photographs of American civil war soldiers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

All of George Templeton Strong’s writing was read by Paris Review editor, public intellectual and occasional videogame pitchmanGeorge Plimpton. Plimpton has a very robust, patrician tone. When he’d conclude a passage, take a breath and say, with gusto, “George Templeton Strong”, it became the most amazing piece of punctuation in television history. Over the years, my oddball friends and I would use our Plimpton impersonations as shorthand. “Is that IPA any good?” “It’s strong.” “How strong?” “George Templeton Strong!” Soon anything that was good was “George Templeton Strong” or just “George Templeton” and finally “GT”. This is probably not what PBS and Burns had in mind when they wanted to bring history to life.

Plimpton isn’t the only unexpected bit of voice acting in the film. There are plenty of terrific actors, like Sam Waterston as Abraham Lincoln, Jason Robards as Ulysses S Grant, Morgan Freeman as Frederick Douglas and M Emmet Walsh, Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi and Pamela Reed elsewhere, but there are some left-of-centre choices, too. Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Hoyt Axton and Garrison Keillor (as Walt Whitman!) all make appearances. Yet over the course of nine episodes some current interview footage was filmed as well, and the world was introduced to the King of PBS.

Before The Civil War, Shelby Foote was an obscure academic. He wasn’t part of Burns’s initial research circle, but a recommendation from All The King’s Men author Robert Penn Warren led the film-maker to the Memphis-based writer. In time, Foote became the key interview subject, for two essential reasons. First, he was an enlightened Southerner who could speak passionately about the Confederates’ point of view without seeming racist or reactionary. Second, and for television purposes perhaps more importantly, was the way he would talk.

A born raconteur with a slow, deep drawl, Foote’s gaze would turn from the camera as he spoke about Appomattox Court House or Fort Sumter as if he’d just been there. He’d lean into a story with a little chuckle, as if the yarn you were about to hear about Stonewall Jackson was something he personally observed while having drinks with the man. All told there is a full hour of Foote over the course of the documentary, and I’d thrill at any outtakes. For 25 years, if I ever hear the name Shelby Foote I instinctively respond “Well, the thing yuh gotta remembah about ol’ Nathan Bedford Forrest is this …”

But it’s conceivable that you haven’t lived in the public television sphere of influence all these years. Luckily, you have an opportunity to explore all this for yourself. On 7 September PBS is showing The Civil War in full, this time in a restored edition. Matthew Brady’s photos will sure look somethin’ in high def, I’m sure. If you only know Burns from the iMovie setting or his later work like Jazz and Baseball, I strongly urge you to check it out. Just beware that you may end up quoting from it for the rest of your life.